Green policies and budget cutting on infrastructure led to wildfires

James Pinkerton:

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Without a doubt, this left-right combo has been effective in shrinking public efforts. As the Bureau of Reclamation’s history page tells it, “The heyday of Reclamation construction of water facilities occurred during the Depression and the thirty-five years after World War II. The last major authorization for construction projects occurred in the late 1960s.”

This cessation of ambitious new public works—stopped by legislation in the ’70s and by litigation ever since—is regarded as a triumph of green thinking. Red ink-minded budget cutters, too, are probably pleased.

Yet here’s the thing: even if virtually all water development projects have been stopped—as detailed here by Fresno resident Victor Davis Hanson, who’s seen the desiccation first hand—population growth has not stopped. In 1970, Americans numbered 205 million; they number more than 326 million today.

So what do we do with all these people? Where should they live? That’s a question that nobody seems to want to answer. And so, in the absence of policies that permit the continued dispersion of the population to reclaimed land, the default has been to pack folks into increasingly crowded conurbations.

For instance, a look at a population map of California shows that its people are jammed into just a few clusters. The result of this dense packing has been runaway housing costs: the median home price in Los Angeles County—a place of 10.1 million—is $615,000. One might ask: how do ordinary people afford that? Answer: they don’t.

Yet whenever Californians seek to venture outside of the built-up cores, the lack of protective infrastructure haunts them—and burns them. That’s the unmistakable signal of the recent fires, which most grievously impacted small towns such as Paradise, California, in faraway Butte County. The town’s former residents—all 27,000 of them—will have to think hard before they return to the charred remains of their homes, knowing that they face the prospect of another inferno in a few years.

In reaction to all these fires, California’s leaders have shown a curious, albeit purposeful, passivity. Just last week, Governor Jerry Brown mused aloud, in his wistful green way, “Our indigenous people had a different way of living with nature. For 10,000 years, there were never more than 300,000 [people living in California]. Now we have 40 million and we have a totally different situation. …It’s people. …And the truth is…things are not going to get better.”

We might pause over those last words: things are not going to get better. To put it mildly, this is not the can-do, pro-growth spirit of TR and FDR, to say nothing of past California governors from both parties, from Hiram Johnson to Brown’s own father, Pat Brown.

So what should we do? How do we protect rural Californians? We could start by pointing to little things—that aren’t so little if it’s your house—such as the need for more paved roads so that fire equipment can get to the fire.

We might also realize that water is not only the staff of life, but also the stuff of putting out fires. And if there’s not enough fresh water occurring naturally, well, we can make more. Yes, we can desalinate seawater, as this author has written about.

If the leaders of California wished to do so, they could make rural California safer and more hospitable to human development. To anticipate the inevitable criticism, nobody’s talking about paving over Yosemite. The state is almost 164,000 square miles, so there’s plenty of room for parks and people.

Of course, it’s perfectly obvious that California’s current leaders want no such such thing as exurban or rural population growth, because it conflicts with their green agenda.

Yet in politics, nothing is permanent, and anti-people political arrangements are even more fleeting. So one day, the dispossessed people of California—that is, the many millions dispossessed by green-imposed land scarcity—will wake up. We should hope that they will peacefully assert their right to shape their own destiny, that they will realize that if spreading out and owning a piece of land was a good idea for Americans in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, it’s a good idea, too, for Americans in the 21st century.
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New infrastructure projects could also be a way for the Republicans to become relevant again in California.  What is needed is to defeat the green ideology that caused this mess.  Death and destruction has a way of focusing the mind on what is really important and leaving dead trees in the forest to fuel wildfires has to be seen as one of the worst ideas the greens ever came up with.

California building restrictions are also a problem because they jam people up against the forest that they will not properly maintain.  More land has to be provided for homes and they can probably get much of the lumber for the construction by harvesting it from the overgrown forests.